I agree with author... instead of doing "Scrum", how about we act like adults, and speak with people when we need to, in respect to their time, schedule accordingly, and not clown and parade around with scrum and poker cards.
There are a whole bunch of legitimate reasons that aspects of Scrum are useful to some teams. Like the planning poker thing –I work with a team of talented, experienced and professional developers, and we still have misconceptions about complexity that are revealed by the planning poker approach.
The idea that 'if everyone just programmed it would be fine' is totally asinine.
Perhaps the original agile was meant correctly, but as of today most organisations just use it to justify and coat (perhaps) same things agile was to be against.
For me today Agile has so way too many faces. If it doesn't work, answer is always "you're not doing agile/scrum correctly). There are always reasons how you're not being agile enough, no matter how many times you fine-tune your "agile" on retrospectives, if there are managers and people misusing it against you, you could as well be better without it.
What an incomprehensive piece of text I wrote. Sorry. I'm not native English speaker.
If you're lucky non of this applies though, but you have to be lucky enough to work with lots of (prehaps we might say all) smart people across whole "chain of command".
Here's little experiment. 10mins after standup is over, ask some people what did they learn in standup. I mean specifics. Noone will know or care or remember. Sure, people get broad picture, which they could just as well by looking onto jira or whatever.
We made a little progress, but unfortunately, you can add process but changing culture is much harder. At the end of the day I got quality and release cadence under control, got a roadmap and a spec together, got basic "table stakes" software infra and tools up, but boy were those first few months a nightmare. I can't imagine any business getting anything done with just "programmers programming".
I mean this in the nicest possible way. Your experience counts for nothing. It's a one-off. Literally.
> I was brought in to provide some adult supervision
> I can't imagine any business getting anything done with just "programmers programming".
Your attitude and your arrogance will definitely limit your ability to lead engineering teams. Talented developers are not going to work with someone like you as long as they have a choice. I do recommend taking a coding bootcamp type course and delivering a project to gain a better understanding of how software projects work.
Well in that case I sure hope you're not planning on wearing one of those t-shirts...
Only to be judged by appearance by people who claim to have soft skills.